The Sign (28 page)

“And you’re helping make it even worse.”

“It’s a trade-off. It’s a message they’ll understand.”

Rydell shook his head again. “No. It’s wrong. There was no need to do it this way. You might help get rid of one evil, but you’ll be feeding one that’s just as vile. One that’ll turn our world into a living hell for any rational person.” His face darkened with resolve, and he fixed Drucker with a hard stare. “We need to figure a way out of this. We need to stop it before it gets too big.”

“You saw what just happened in Egypt. It’s too late.”

“We have to stop it, Keenan,” Rydell insisted.

Drucker shrugged. “We might just have to agree to disagree on that one.”

“I still have a say in this.”

“Within reason. And right now, you’re being unreasonable.”

Rydell thought for a moment, then said, provokingly, “You need me for the smart dust.”

“I do,” Drucker nodded calmly.

“You can’t do this without it.”

“I know that.”

Rydell was momentarily thrown by Drucker’s lack of even the slightest hint of agitation. “So?”

“So . . .” Drucker winced, as if pained by something. “So I had to take out some insurance.”

Rydell studied him, unsure of what he meant—then it fell into place. “What?” he hissed. “What have you done? What have you done, you son of a bitch?”

Drucker let him stew on it for a moment or two, then just said, “Rebecca.”

The word stabbed Rydell like an ice pick. His eyes turned to saucers as he yanked out his phone and stabbed a speed-dial button. After two rings, a voice answered. Not Rebecca’s. A man’s voice. Rydell instantly recognized it as the voice of Rebecca’s bodyguard.

“Ben, where’s Becca?”

“She’s safe, Mr. Rydell.”

Rydell’s heart somersaulted with relief. He shot a victorious glance at Drucker.

The man’s face was unnervingly serene.

A bolt of worry ripped through Rydell. “Put Becca on,” he ordered the bodyguard, hoping for an answer he knew he wasn’t going to get.

“I can’t do that, Mr. Rydell.”

The words coiled around his gut and twisted it, hard. “Put her on,” he growled.

The bodyguard’s voice didn’t waver. “Only if Mr. Drucker gives the word, sir.”

Rydell threw his phone to the ground and charged at Drucker. “Where is she?” he yelled.

Drucker sprang out of his seat and deflected Rydell’s attack, grabbing his hand and elbow and twisting his arm sideways and back. As he did so, he kicked out Rydell’s leg from under him. The billionaire tumbled to the floor heavily, slamming against one of the seats. Drucker eyed him for a beat, then took a couple of steps back.

“She’s fine,” he said as he straightened his jacket. His face was slightly flushed, his breathing slightly ragged. He took in a calming breath before adding, “And she’ll stay fine. As long as you don’t do anything foolish. Do we understand each other?”

Deir Al-Suryan Monastery, Wadi Natrun, Egypt

T
ucked away behind the crumbled wall four hundred yards west of the monastery and veiled by their desert camouflage netting, Fox Two and his two men watched silently through their high-powered binoculars, and waited.

Beside them, nestling under the truck’s canvas top, the long range acoustical device unit sat patiently, ready to wield its unseen power again. It had been painted a matte sand-beige in preparation for their mission, a color that had been matched perfectly to blend in with the terrain outside the monastery and farther up, on top of the mountain, above the cave. They’d left the directional microphone in its casing on this occasion. Today’s event had been planned strictly as a one-way conversation, unlike the long hours they’d spent during all those weeks and months, up on the mountain, when Father Jerome had occasionally seen fit to ask a question or two.

Fox Two studied the restless crowd below. So far, he’d been able to push the right buttons and generate the responses he needed without a problem. Father Jerome had reacted as expected to the gentle prodding he’d given him on the rooftop, after the sign had appeared above him—but then, he’d been well primed to react that way. A few whispered words, aimed at the more visibly heated pockets in the mob, were also enough to trigger a cascading reaction, to nudge them into a frenzy at the sight of an escaping car. A high-frequency, ultra-loud pulse using the crowd-control setting was more than enough to hobble their fervor when it was no longer needed and get them to pull away in order to facilitate an escape.

Remarkable,
he still thought, even after using the
LRAD
device so often that it had become second nature to him. A simple concept, really—projecting noise in a tightly focused audio beam, the same way a film projector’s lens magnifies and focuses a shaft of light, so that only the persons—or person, for it was as accurate as a sniper’s rifle—in the device’s crosshairs could hear it. Even at that distance. And either make it appear as if someone’s voice, live or taped, was actually inside the target’s head, or—using the less subtle crowd-control mode—send an unbearably loud, caustic sound pulse into the target’s ears that, at its highest setting, caused nausea and fainting and crippled the toughest enemy.

Simple, but hugely effective.

His master’s voice,
Fox Two mused.

The power of suggestion was particularly effective in this case, when the subjects were already burning with the desire to do what was required of them, as in the case of the selected targets in the mob outside the monastery, or, as in the case of Father Jerome, when they’d undergone weeks of forced indoctrination. Electroshocks and sleep deprivation sessions, followed by cocktails of methohexitol to take the edge off. Transcranial mental stimulation. A complete psycho-chemical breakdown. Tripping the switches inside the brain, disarming it entirely before bombarding it psychologically. Implanting visions, thoughts, feelings. Conditioning the brain to accept an alternate reality, like hearing the voice of God or overcoming one’s humility in order to embrace the notion of being the Chosen One.

He panned his binoculars across the desert, west of his position. Even though he knew what he was looking for, it still took him the better part of a minute to locate Fox One and his unit. The four men and their gear were also virtually invisible, huddled under camouflage netting in the sand dunes a couple of hundred yards away. Their contribution had been flawless, as expected. Its effect, staggering. He’d seen it before, in a video of a test in the desert. But not like this. Not live. Not in front of an unsuspecting audience.

It had taken his breath away. Even for a battle-hardened cynic like him, it was a heart-stopping moment. A one-two punch that, he knew, would resonate around the world.

Fox Two turned his attention back to the hordes at the monastery’s gates. He’d soon be able to leave this dump for good, he thought with a degree of relish. It had been a hellish assignment. Living in hiding, on call at dawn and at dusk, climbing up and down the mountain, lugging the gear, day in and day out. He’d been out here in the desert way too long. He missed the feel of a woman’s skin and the smell of a good barbecue, but most of all, he missed living among people.

Soon,
he thought.

But before he could do that, he needed to make sure that the mission ended as smoothly as it had begun.

Woburn, Massachusetts

T
he smell of fresh coffee tripped Matt’s mind and coaxed him out of a dreamless sleep. Everything around him looked hazy. He tried to sit up, but did so too quickly and almost blacked out and had to try again, a bit slower this time. His head felt like it was filled with tar as he took in his surroundings and awareness trickled in.

The TV was on, though Matt couldn’t really make out what it was showing. He tried blinking the fogginess out of his eyes. Jabba was sitting by the small table next to the window, watching the TV. He turned and grinned at Matt, a smoking cup of coffee in one hand—a venti or a grande or whatever quirkily-original-yet-misguidedly-obnoxious name coffee shops had replaced
large
with these days—and a half-eaten glazed doughnut—or was that “glazé”?—in the other, with which he pointed at the two other oversized cups and the box of doughnuts on the table.

“Breakfast is served,” he said, in between mouthfuls.

Matt acknowledged the venti-sized scientist with a weary smile before noticing the daylight streaming in.

“How long was I out? What time is it?”

“Almost eleven. Which means you’ve been out for,” Jabba did a quick mental calculation, “sixteen hours or so.”

Which Matt had needed.

Badly.

He also noticed a couple of newspapers on the table. The headlines were in an unusually large font—the type only used when a major event had occurred. An almost quarter-page photograph of the apparition, in color, was also emblazoned across the front pages, next to older, file portraits of Father Jerome.

Matt looked up at Jabba. Jabba nodded, and his expression took a detour into more ominous territory. “The Eagle has landed,” he said somberly, aiming his half-eaten doughnut at the TV.

Matt watched the footage from Egypt in silent disbelief. Breathless reports coming in from around the world also showed the explosive reaction to what had happened at the monastery.

In St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City, tens of thousands of people had assembled, hungrily awaiting the pope’s guidance on how to treat the apparition. In the Praça da Sé in São Paulo, hordes of euphoric Brazilians spilled into the square from in and out of the city, invading every available inch of the Sé cathedral, also looking for answers. The reactions reflected the local variations in faith and the different levels of appetite for the supernatural across the planet. The scenes were repeated in frenzied massings outside churches and in city squares in other centers of Christianity, from Mexico to the Philippines, but were different elsewhere. In the Far East, the reaction was generally more muted. Crowds had taken to the streets in China, Thailand, and Japan, but they were mostly orderly and there were only pockets of disturbance. The hotspot of Jerusalem, on the other hand, was very tense, with worrying signs of polarization already apparent among its religious groups. Christians, Muslims, and Jews were taking to the streets, looking for answers, conflicted and unsure about how to treat what many of them saw as a miraculous, supernatural manifestation—but one that didn’t match anything prophesized in any of their sacred writings. The same thing was going on in the Islamic world. Confused worshippers had taken over city centers, town squares, and mosques across the Arab world and farther east in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Indonesia. As always, moderate voices seemed to be either holding back, or crowded out by those of the more radical clerics. Reports were coming in of scattered skirmishes and brawls in several cities, both between followers of different religions as well as infighting among members of the same faith.

Around the world, official reaction was only starting to trickle in, but so far, government and religious leaders had refrained from making public statements about the phenomenon—apart from some fiery rhetoric that a few fundamentalist firebrands weren’t shy to express.

Throughout the coverage, Father Jerome’s face was everywhere. It was plastered across the front page of every newspaper in the country, if not the world. It beamed down from every channel, the frail priest suddenly thrust into megastardom. Every news outlet was locked in on the story. Anchors and talking heads across the language spectrum were struggling to hold back on the superlatives—and failing. The whole world was firmly gripped by the unexplained event.

As Matt drank and ate and watched the screen, Jabba told him what had happened during the night. The caffeine and sugar worked its magic on him again, slowly injecting a semblance of life back into his veins; the wall-to-wall footage from Egypt and from the rest of the world reached the parts the caffeine had missed. And with each new report, with each new video clip, Matt felt a crippling chill seep through him. The stakes were growing exponentially, along with the realization of the enormity of what he was facing.

When the doughnuts ran out, Jabba turned the volume down and filled Matt in on what he’d been up to. He’d been busy. After Matt had conked out and before the breakfast run, he’d gone back out to the reception alcove, handed the weedy receptionist another ten-dollar bill, and worked late into the night, and again this morning.

He’d gotten an update on the tracker’s position, and handed Matt the printouts. They showed that the Merc had left the Seaport district, the last position they had for it, sometime before ten the previous night. It had traveled to the downtown area where the signal had been lost—presumably boxed in by concrete walls deep in the underground parking lot of some building. It had appeared again soon after seven that morning and returned to the same location in the Seaport district, and hadn’t moved since.

Jabba had then spent most of his time trying to beef up the thin sketch they had managed to compile on the doomed research team and its covert project. He’d made more calls to contacts in the industry and had given Google and Cuil’s search algorithms a real workout, and although he hadn’t come up with much, what he didn’t find also told him something.

Even though his experience was in non-defense-related research projects, the secrecy surrounding his and his peers’ work was often military-like in its intensity. And although defense-related projects were even more cloaked, there was often a whisper, a hint, something that had seeped through the cracks and gave an idea, however vague, of what ballpark the project was in. The critical piece of information to protect was more often than not how a goal was to be achieved; the goal itself was, in most cases, at least obliquely known, especially within the most well-connected techie circles. In this case, however, no one knew anything. The project had been born, and had died, in total and utter secrecy. Which told Jabba that it was unlike anything he’d ever encountered. It also spoke to the resources and determination of those behind it, which made the prospect of going up against them even less appealing—if that was even possible.